The environmental concern was minimal at the time of Gandhi, but
his ideas on VillageSwaraj,
decentralization,Swadeshi,Sarvodyaetc made him an advocate of
environmentalism. He is often considered as a man with deep ecological view.
The ideas of Gandhi have been widely used by different streams of environmental
philosophy like green, deep ecology, etc and different environmental movements
across the globe. An eminent environmental thinker Ramachandra Guha identified
three distinct strands in Indian Environmentalism, the Crusading Gandhians,
Appropriate Technologists and Ecological Marxists. He observed that, unlike the
third one, the first two strands rely heavily on Gandhi. The purpose of this
paper is to identify the Gandhian elements used by the Ecological Marxists in
India. The Silent Valley Movement from Kerala is taken as a case study to
analyze how ecological Marxists resort to Gandhian techniques to fight against
environmental injustice. The role ofKerala
Sastra Sahitya Parishad(KSSP),
a People’s Science Movement (PSM) from Kerala with a Marxist background is
studied to understand different strategies they used in the movement. It is
observed that the methodologies adopted throughout the movement are inspired by
Gandhian methods as previously used by other environmental movements like
Chipko. The paper concludes that, like the Crusading Gandhians and Alternate
Technologists, the Ecological Marxists also adopted the Gandhian strategies to
work for ecological stability.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

I stand before you to speak on Gandhi who was shot dead some sixty years ago but who is still alive. He is still the most frequently mentioned individual in the world and is still the centre of the controversies some of which were raised by his actions and beliefs. Every year at least three or four books are written about him in some part of the world or other and he is being constantly discussed at several seminars and intellectual discourses all over the world. The date of his birth has been proclaimed as the Non-violence Day by the United Nations Organization. In our terror-stricken world of today, his teachings are even more relevant than they were when they were preached in the first half of the twentieth century.

The world to-day hails him as a Mahatma - a Great Soul - a Saint. Gandhi always resented the title and found it intensely painful. He never cared for any beatification and insisted that he was an ordinary man who was trying his level best for the realization of the Divine Presence.

Gandhi was not born a saint but chiseled himself into one by intensely agonizing experiments in austerity and discipline. He chose to call his biography “My experiments with Truth,” It is very difficult, if not impossible, to project Gandhi in few minutes. Sixty years after his death, he still remains a sort of enigma. The flood of copious literature on Gandhi does nothing to solve the mystery.

Unlike most of us, Gandhi continued to grow and change till the last moment of his life and he never worried about contracting himself. “In my search for Truth, I have never cared about consistency.” Like Emerson, he rejected consistency as the virtue of small minds. He was bold enough to proclaim that ‘If my readers find any inconsistency in my views, they should reject the older ones and believe in the later as my views might have changed.’

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

By Dr. Ravindra Kumar*

“I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.”

– M K Gandhi

The above short statement of the Mahatma is itself sufficient enough to elucidate the stature of Gandhi and the spirit in the root of Gandhism besides proving its significance for the present and all times to come. Further, this statement is, despite being short, capable of illustrating the source and basis of his life and ideas for those who are, more or less, familiar with life of Gandhi, and Gandhism. Even though, as I have observed during my continuous visits to various places of the world, people of the present generation, youth in particular, desire to learn more and more about Satya and Ahimsa, the core points of Gandhian philosophy, it is necessary to make a fair analysis of life of Gandhi on one hand, and Gandhism, having this short statement in the centre, on the other.

The word Gandhi is about that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who on the basis of his exemplary and inspiring life and works became an icon and ideal not only for his contemporaries all over the world, but equally for generations to come. The legacy he has left through his actions, which he successfully carried out on the strength of the supreme human value of Ahimsa, in fact, makes him relevant for all times to come.